Ginny Ruffner, the pioneering Seattle artist and innovator who helped put Seattle on the map as a national hub for glass art, died Monday in her Ballard home. She was 72.
Ruffner’s death was confirmed Wednesday by her gallerist, Sarah Traver, and close friend, Seattle artist and educator Marge Levy.
Known for intricate glass and metal sculptures that fused art with science and technology — as well as her wit, joyful personality and wild salt-and-pepper curls, which mirrored her exuberant glass pieces — Ruffner was perpetually curious about art, science and life. Her favorite project, she liked to say, was whatever was next.
“Pretty much everything in the world makes me laugh or makes me curious, or both,” she said in a 2020 interview.
Ruffner reinvented both herself and the glass art genre throughout her career by reclaiming “decorative” techniques and later incorporating cutting-edge technology like virtual reality, augmented reality and artificial intelligence. Ruffner made her way to the top of her field as well as major institutions like the Seattle Art Museum, the Corning Museum of Glass and the Smithsonian American Art Museum, among many others.
And across her trailblazing career, Ruffner defied the odds.
First, by transforming lampworking — a glass-torching technique (rather than glassblowing) long dismissed to the realm of tchotchkes — into a contemporary art form. Then in the ’80s, by rising to the top of the male-dominated glass art field. And, by surviving a near-fatal car crash in 1991, she surpassed doctors’ expectations with a quasi-complete recovery and found a renewed vigor for creating ever-larger and more complex artworks.
With her trademark humor, Ruffner credited all of it to “plain stubbornness” in a 2020 interview. “As they say in the South, I’m an ornery cuss.”
Friends and collaborators praised the late artist’s creative, joyful and curious spirit.
“Each moment with her was an honor, a journey and a romp,” said Greg Robinson, chief curator of the Bainbridge Island Museum of Art. “One was always in danger of bursting into laughter around Ginny.”
Against the odds
How did Ruffner, a Southern girl born in 1952 in Atlanta and trained as a painter, end up a key figure in the Northwest studio glass movement?
Thank French artist Marcel Duchamp. An art history course encounter with his 1915 work, “The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even,” also known as “The Large Glass,” nudged Ruffner to start painting on glass.
Ruffner continually innovated, seeking out other mediums, like bronze, public art, drawing and bookmaking, as well as cutting-edge technologies, like augmented reality. And while she bristled at the idea of being a “glass artist” — that moniker sounded like she was made out of glass, Ruffner joked — the material remained a constant over the course of her career.
Early in her career, Ruffner got a job at glassworking companies making decorative objects like chickens and horses, perfecting her flameworking skills, using a torch to heat and shape glass rods used as lines to draw in three-dimensional space. After teaching the first borosilicate lampworking class at Pilchuck Glass School in 1984, Ruffner moved to Seattle, where she quickly emerged as one of the stars of the burgeoning glass art movement alongside pioneering peers like Dale Chihuly and William Morris.
“Her larger-than-life personality mimicked her work, which helped change the discourse on glass at that time,” Pilchuck Glass School said in a statement posted on Instagram. “Intensely inventive, Ginny pioneered the use of boro in a sculptural context and combined materials, adding paint and metal to bring her work into an architectural context.”
In 1991, Ruffner’s stratospheric rise was cut short by a car crash. After a coma, she had to relearn how to speak and walk, how to paint — how to be herself.
In typically defiant fashion, Ruffner recovered and found a way to expand her artistic scope with new ideas and technologies, which was documented in the award-winning film “Ginny Ruffner: A Not So Still Life.”
After the accident, Ruffner leaned into her self-declared “geeky” nature (she was said to read science journals and books for fun) and her interest in physics, genetics, neuroscience and bioengineering. The result: fanciful sculptures flowering with leaves and vines, brainish hemispheres that twisted and curled around bronze and other materials. These works were designed to make you think and feel, to nudge visitors to marvel at the world and the possibilities of human creativity.
Later, Ruffner embraced the use of virtual reality, augmented reality and AI, working with local programmers and researchers to incorporate it into (and onto) her sculptures.
“It really resulted in this dynamic, virtual sculpture,” said Traver, whose gallery has represented Ruffner for more than a decade. “It raised awareness of how technology can be used for artists with disabilities. How artists can and must engage with scientists to broaden the scope of scientific advancements, how that changes the way that developers think about the tools they’re creating. She was brilliant in that way — and fearless.”
For her 2019 exhibit at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, “Reforestation of the Imagination,” Ruffner created a forest of glass tree stumps that bloomed once again with augmented reality. The show, which later traveled nationally, was a major highlight of her career — as was being awarded an honorary doctorate degree from Cornish College of the Arts last spring.
Another, friends said, was championing other artists, especially other women. In 2016, she founded SOLA — short for “Support for Old Lady Artists” — to encourage women to exhibit more, to increase visibility with grants and to help with career support and digital archiving. She wanted to ensure that other women of her age and talent could achieve a similar level of success, said Levy, her longtime friend, collaborator and SOLA co-founder.
“I’ve known Ginny since 1991, when her humor and emotional intelligence overwhelmed me,” Levy said. “We could be giggling children one minute and solving the art world’s problems (the next).”
In her Alice in Wonderland-like house, studio and lush adjoining garden in Ballard, Ruffner hosted many SOLA meetings and annual summer parties. Levy described Ruffner’s house as a central meeting place for her large circle of friends and collaborators; she said the property will go to SOLA.
Even as she worked on SOLA, Ruffner remained ever-prolific and ever-curious. Just last winter, the National Nordic Museum’s entryway welcomed her “Project Aurora,” a 20-foot LED light installation that evokes the aurora borealis through renderings of the phenomenon funneled through an AI system.
Like Ruffner, the work is ever-evolving, colorful and exuberant. Bright green appears, then morphs into blue — then, a wild streak of purple.
“I’m not afraid of the unknown,” Ruffner said in an interview for the work’s audio guide. “Yet another thing to explore, yet another thing to be curious about.”
Ruffner is survived by her brother, Al Martin, and her sisters, Melinda Jester and Kay Argroves, as well as multiple nieces and nephews. A celebration of life will take place in the spring, with a date to be announced later. Donations to solaseattle.org are suggested in lieu of flowers or other tributes.
Editor’s note: Comments are disabled on this story, per Seattle Times practice for obituaries.